The Trump administration said it would be reviewing the powers of the California Coastal Commission, a state agency entrusted with preserving the coast. The commerce secretary has accused the state of “environmental extremism” amid a federal push for oil production.

Fuck the reflecting pool. This has not gotten nearly enough coverage or generated the proper outrage. People thrown in prison for 30-50 years for the "crime" ofmaking zines and belonging to a book club!! This is straight-up totalitarian atrocity. Political prisoners thrown in a gulag to rot.

Somehow I missed that this extremely important paper was officially published in a journal last year!

"I tell my kids, you’re allowed to watch the TV all you want… Just don’t turn it on! This way, they will begin to understand the futility of all things."

I’m sorry, no. This is not the guy who did the reflecting pool. No. Come on. We’re just putting a hat on a hat here. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/u...

I last published in a Frontiers journal in 2012, when I thought their publishing model was bad. It's SO much worse now, but also such a stark consequences of the pathology of publications-as-currency plaguing academia.

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology 🧪🌐 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

There’s nothing more awe-inspiring than watching a carpenter bee eat a woodpecker.

I wonder if anyone at Google has ever had second thoughts about putting the dumbest version of their AI in their most consumer facing product.

There’s nothing more awe-inspiring than watching a carpenter bee eat a woodpecker.

I couldn’t be prouder of the stellar work @apvelilla.bsky.social did for his PhD. A phenomenal set of work on social learning, cooperation, and risk. Keep on eye on this guy, he’s one to watch.

DOCTOR: "So what seems to be the problem?" PATIENT: "Mmhbbhhggr hhruuh engghhuu." DOCTOR: "I'm sorry I can't understand, but don't worry. Great singer Bob Dylan is in town. Go see his show and no matter what ails you, you'll feel better!" PATIENT (sadly): "Ehg ddnghh m'm Bddnnn."

I couldn’t be prouder of the stellar work @apvelilla.bsky.social did for his PhD. A phenomenal set of work on social learning, cooperation, and risk. Keep on eye on this guy, he’s one to watch.

I'm teaching an online workshop on ABM and model-based thinking through ICPSR next month. Details linked below in case you or someone you know is interested.

If you're UC faculty, I'd encourage you to sign this letter in support of the University of California reinstating the SAT in admissions. ucstudentsuccess.org

Never forget that YOU are a data center. Drink some water ffs.

This is fucking insanity www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Steve’s plenary was epic.

What things are often missed out? Risk! Life history! Individual variation! Inequality! @psmaldino.bsky.social Speaking my language in his talk on Development of Risk Behaviours and thier Cultural Transmission #CES2026 @ces2026.bsky.social

Ah, to be a carefree young man in a cozy sweater, hoisting an enormous spider crab

Happy 100th Birthday Sir David! Short clip from a film with Sir David Attenborough featuring @ellafcole.bsky.social explaining research in @wythamwoods.bsky.social into how Great Tits adjust behaviour during incubation to fine-tune hatching date: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGjL...

found this guy on Tiktok who has discovered carpenter's speed squares make an insanely satisfying noise when you bounce them off tires or wood, called @lostcoastedc on there

We need a Ghostbusters rewrite where one stubborn EPA regulator is all that stands in the way of Big Tech-funded ghost resurrection technology destroying the world

David Robert Grimes (@drg.bsky.social) made an Instagram reel calling me a "small-brained" idiot because my name is similar to Paul Saladino, the person who actually made the video Grimes was criticizing. It's such a dumb and surreal sign of our times. www.instagram.com/reels/DW5xGD...

New Open Access book edited by Cristina Moya @hyperadapthyrax.bsky.social and Wolfgang Wagner on identity and culture. Many great chapter by great folks. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The natural selection of bad scientists.

The normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.

Conference update emails for #HBES2026 and #CESRabat will be sent soon. In the meantime, updated programs are live on both conference websites: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/hbes2026 airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 Check them out! @ces2026.bsky.social @hbes2026.bsky.social

What about we strike and don't give our talks?

My talk is in parallel to yours: same boat, same feelings. I was jokingly suggesting that all of our panel members should just pre-record our talks (and the Q&A too 😅) and just attend the "4 decades" panel.

Got the program for @ces2026.bsky.social. Looks amazing, but it's a genuine TRAVESTY that the panel on "40 decades of cultural evolution" is just another parallel session and not on the main plenary stage. Rob Boyd's talk conflicts with mine, and I encourage everyone to skip me to go see Rob.

Stalin fundamentally crippled Soviet #science in the 1930s and almost a century later it still hasn't recovered. That's what Trump, RFK Jr., Vought, and MAGA are doing right now to the United States.

This was really well done and worth a watch.

Big news! The 14th ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI 2026) will be held September 27-30, 2026, at the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing near Washington, DC. I'm excited to be a program co-chair this year. ci.acm.org/2026/ Papers and abstracts due 8 June. Check it out!

What is the future of international politics? Welcome to a neo-royalist order...the video! Thanks Georgetown for putting this together. It was super fun to make. Enjoy. @cgesgeorgetown.bsky.social youtu.be/300k0WzYnqI?...

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

If only there was some *extremely recent* event where we saw what happens when you put a bunch of people on a boat with a communicable disease. But alas, nothing even remotely like that happened in the last, say, six years so we just don't know...

Looks like Harvard is making more bad decisions on behalf of the ruling class. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

What makes adaptive decision-making possible? New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati osf.io/preprints/ps...

In France, if you want to build a home above a certain size, you’re legally required to use a licensed architect. Can you guess what that size is

In the Stanford Daily today. stanforddaily.com/2026/04/13/a...

My one-hour special “Rick Steves Iran: Yesterday and Today,” which helps humanize 90 million Iranian people, is streaming free and ad-free at www.ricksteves.com/watch-iran.

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

You know what? I'll admit it. The credible threat by a madman to wipe out a nation of 90 million people for basically no reason (presumably using nuclear weapons) successfully distracted me. I am now distracted.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

"In temperate climates all over the world, most people wear pants. Some wear shorts, some wear skirts, and some wear only purple undies, but one cannot deny the tremendous popularity of pants...What selective processes favored this cumbersome garment you had to put on one leg at a time?"